Patricia Clarkson projects great warmth as Juliette, a Canadian journalist who travels to Cairo to join her husband, a UN aid worker stationed in Egypt, for a scenic holiday among the Pyramids. He’s held up in the Gaza Strip, however, so he asks a former co-worker, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), to get her settled into her hotel.

Unaccustomed to the overwhelming attention the local male populace pays her (she’s frightened, but flattered, too), the middle-aged blonde beauty flees to the café owned by Tareq, unaware that such places are the domain of men alone. Gradually, a bond blossoms between the two strangers as they stroll about the city, which itself is a character.

The sense of place in Ruba Nadda’s low-key love story is so strong that it almost overwhelms the slow dance of these drifting souls and the tranquility of their tentative romance.

Review: Winter’s Bone Noir may be the MSG of genres — a little pinch makes almost any film tastier — but does it work for Ozark gothic drama?

Review: Secrets Of The Tribe The tribe of the title, as José Padilha’s deft and outrageous documentary makes clear, are not the Stone Age Yanomami people of the Amazon but the anthropologists themselves.

Review: Cracks In her debut feature, Jordan Scott (daughter of Ridley) has conjured a lovely oddity combining elements of The Prime of Miss Brodie, The Children’s Hour, If, The Belles of St. Trinian’s, and even a bit of Lord of the Flies.

Review: Life During Wartime You can’t get enough Happiness — or so Todd Solondz must have thought when he spun off this sour sequel to his 1998 misanthropic ode to suburban perversion.

Review: I Am Love Italian cinema has come a long way from Marco Bellocchio’s Devil in the Flesh .

Review: Family Affair You will never, ever, ever complain about your family again after watching the first 15 minutes of Family Affair

Review: The Freebie As can be seen in the opening bliss montage, these two almost disgustingly in love with each other: they hug, kiss, tickle toes, do crossword puzzles — everything, it seems, except have sex.

Review: Dancing Across Borders Anne Bass’s documentary about a 16-year-old Cambodian boy whom she brought to the US to study at the School of American Ballet looks at first to be limited by its feel-good story arc, but it dances beyond that.

WOMEN WITH SWORDS: KING HU AND THE ART OF WUXIA | March 12, 2013 Decades before women took center stage in the one-two punch of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill , King Hu (1932-1997; the subject of a retrospective at the HFA) put swords in the hands of a soaring heroine in Come Drink with Me.

REVIEW: EMPEROR | March 12, 2013 Yes, Tommy Lee Jones plays the "supreme commander" of the US forces in this historical drama from Peter Webber ( Girl with a Pearl Earring ) that takes place after the Japanese surrender in World War II, and the Oscar winner puts in another towering performance.

REVIEW: 21 AND OVER | March 05, 2013 As one of the Asian stereotypes in this hit-or-(mostly)-miss comedy from writer/directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore says, "Fuck kids these days. Every one of you is drunk, stupid, and fat."

REVIEW: THE LAST EXORCISM PART II | March 06, 2013 Now that the shaky-cam nonsense has been left behind, what remains are textureless, overlit, sub-TV-quality visuals that only accentuate the fact that our protagonist, Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell), is at least a decade older than the 17-year-old exorcised sect-escapee that she's playing.

REVIEW: JACK THE GIANT SLAYER | March 06, 2013 Stop me if you've heard this one before: a farm boy dreams of adventure, finds it, and falls in love with a princess along the way. (For everyone's sake, let's just hope she's not his sister.)